mashup

When I read “Taroko Gorge,” by Nick Montfort, something about the endless scrolling through a natural landscape made me think of Gary Snyder’s masterpiece Mountains and Rivers without End, inspired largely by Chinese landscape scroll paintings.

As a longtime reader and admirer of Snyder’s poetry this mashup arises out of deep respect for both Snyder’s and Montfort’s work. This is not intended to imitate or generate lines by Snyder: merely to gestures towards his poetry. “Taroko Gary” is a path through a digital landscape, built out of Nick’s trailblazing poetry generation code and using some of Snyder’s words from “Endless Streams and Mountains” as cobbles.